 We're back live, it's the one o'clock show here on Tuesday, the fifth already of January. We have Elizabeth Satoris, and she is an evolutionary biologist and a futurist, which is, you know, I stand in awe of that combination of things. And she is here because she won a show in our Christmas party. We raffled off, may I say, we selected at random three shows, three people who could do shows, and this is, and she won. So congratulations on winning, Elizabeth. Thank you so much. We'll do this again, and it won't have to be a raffle either. So, you know, we've talked about many things, you and me, over the years. But this is an interesting topic. This is how it is very relevant right now. How viruses like the COVID, you know, affect evolution. And you're into that. And you can speak to that, and you can take the 50,000 foot level and try to help us understand where this little speck of time fits in the long-term continuum of the evolution of the planet, of the microbes, and of humanity. So give me your opening thoughts on it, and we'll go from there. Okay. Well, as I like to say, being an evolution biologist is a deep pastist. We're looking into the deep past of Earth, the history of Earth, basically, the history of life, in order to see where can we go from here, you know, where we come from, and why are we in the situation we're in now. And the most important thing to me, of course, about this COVID crisis is that we're talking about the microbial world. Now, 30 years ago, we considered all bacteria, evil germs, right? And it took us 30 years of fighting with antibiotics, which are literally in Greek anti-life agents, in order to wipe them all out. And then we got into trouble, because we found we were selecting for the worst ones, and the cleanest, most sanitized places in the world were the hospitals. They had the worst infections ever and still do. So now we're in the same situation with viruses. We haven't got yet what the relationship between bacteria, viruses, and us is. Now, in evolution, no creature larger than a bacterium. There are only two kinds of cells on the planet, the bacterial cells, and the cooperatives they built, which are nucleated cells, which we're made of. Now, there's never been any creature larger than a bacterium or a bacterium, for that matter, that has not evolved with its contingent of bacteria and microbes. We cannot live without them. And it took us 30 years to figure out that our bacteria run our immune system because they're plastered all over our guts, and they repair the gut linings, and they run the immune system, and they make vitamins, and they do all these wonderful things for us. Only a tiny, tiny part of them get into trouble. Now, it's exactly the same story with viruses, and we don't get it yet. So we're now committing the same genocidal war on the microbial, on the viral world, along with the bacteria. Of course, they and the funguses all get wiped out in this war. And so I think we're only making matters worse, that if we don't learn how to get along with this kind of occasional nasty flu virus, then we're in trouble, because we can't, we're going to keep getting one pandemic after another if we don't change this relationship. So if I offered you a carte blanca on how to deal with this virus, or some of the other pernicious viruses we've seen over the past 20 years or so, how would you change our approach? Well, I would ask something that every health personnel person in the world knows now, and that is, how do you get a strong immune system? They all know that a strong immune system is the best defense against this kind of pandemic. Okay, how do you get a strong immune system? Everybody knows now. It's about healthy food. It depends on what you're feeding your bacteria. And you notice that the most vulnerable people in the world are the old people who are taking 25 drugs for other chronic diseases and stuffed into windowless hospitals and places like that. That is not going to help grandma avoid COVID. So what's healthy food? What's healthy food? Good question. See, what we have going now is kind of weird, because you have the same big multinational company, I'll make you guess which one it is, which is using a chemical patented as an antibiotic, one of those anti-life agents, to spray on all your grains and veggies, all the food fields, and then stuffing the rest of the antibiotics down the throats of the, or injecting them into the four-feet lot animals. So almost everything in your supermarket has been toxically poisoned by these very expensive pharmaceutical drugs, actually. And then the same company comes back and sells you pharmaceutical drugs to make you well when they've made you sick. Now, I'm sorry, I'm speaking very plainly here. And if you look into Bayer's history, you'll see that they've been doing very nasty stuff for a very long time. So I get things like that from an evolutionary perspective. Healthy food is the answer, and nobody is promoting it in the whole health field. You don't hear them talking about it. Well, there's a lot of people who promote pure food, you know, organic food, but the health without pesticides feel very passionate about that. And so it sounds like to me, something we've heard before, something only a very small fraction of people in this country maybe other countries are different. But in this country, abide by that. And yes, we live on hamburgers. And the Trump diet, the worst foods, the fast foods, and all that, which are never going to be all that healthy because they have to be made in bulk and mass. They have to be served quickly. They have to get along without a lot of refrigeration and so forth. So I mean, I think that that should be clear to everyone that if you eat better, you'll have a better immune system and you'll be able to resist this. But there are comorbidities that will come as people get older anyway, even if you're really careful on what you eat. Isn't that true? Yes, of course. There I have a dear friend who just passed away and was not quite 80 who lived the most healthy life you can imagine. Food-wise, hours of yoga every day, deep meditation, everything you can think of that we tell people to do. And she's gone and I'm not, and I'm five years older than she is. So what is genetic? Well, it's genetic, it's life. She was told that she compromised her body by sleeping on irradiated ground in Afghanistan, go figure. So, you know, we have, I used to say humanity has thought up more suicide weapons than I could adjust that when I was kids. But COVID is not the only problem on our horizon in terms of health. You know, I'm passionate about 5G, which oddly causes the same hypoxia kinds of symptoms as the COVID virus. What's hypoxia? Hypoxia is when not that you're not getting enough air into your lungs, but that your red blood cells would pick up the oxygen from the lungs, can't deliver it to the cells. So you're starved of oxygen, but not because you're not getting taken in the air, it's because of what happens to the red blood cells. Are you saying that 5G has an effect on red blood cells? Yes, absolutely. Where do you get that from? Well, there are thousands of studies on up through 4G. They're refusing to do studies on 5G, although some people are managing to go through the data and see what the changes are and what the effects of these microwaves, we're being microwaved now, are. So the medical evidence is quite good. And I don't want to get into too many controversial issues, but the important thing really to recognize is that we need strong immune systems and that the COVID authorities are not even mentioning that. You've heard and we've read about these people, especially the diplomatic service who are in embassy properties around the world, especially around Russia, where they get sick for no apparent reason. And it happened in Cuba a few years ago. It has happened for a while in living quarters and working quarters of American diplomats in Moscow. And nobody knows exactly what, but the coincidence is too great to ignore. And it sounds like that's a microwave kind of weapon that the Russians have developed, which makes you sick. Have you heard about that? Do you believe there's any truth to that? I do know that the kind of microwaves used in 5G were originally developed for crowd control for deactivating people. Is that right? Wow, interesting. Now, suffice to say, as you say, there are weapons that we don't know yet are weapons. Technology, there's always a secondary or side effect that could be weaponized. And we've seen that in so many examples. I want to throw a theory at you, Elizabeth. An evolutionary theory, if you want. So nature is quite remarkable, I'm sure you'll agree. It's remarkable in the microbial sense. It's remarkable certainly in the human sense because we came from the sea and we are actually turned inside out with all these microbes through our intestinal tract. And it's an essential part of us to have, I don't want to say parasites, but cooperative organisms in our bodies that would help us. In fact, that we are dependent on them. At the same time, there's a great harmony in the world which didn't come easy. It came through millions of years of evolution. I'm sure you've thought about that. And sometimes nature feels you have to call the herd. You have to call the herd. And so maybe these viruses pop up and their larger meaning in the evolution of the species and the planet is to call the herd. And maybe it's, I mean, all animals have this experience, all herds, all herds have this experience. They get called by one mechanism or another. Are we being called by nature now? Well, you know, I'm leery of the concept of like Gaia's revenge. You hear that kind of thing. You know, she does get in even with humans for being so bad. And in a way, what you're saying can turn into that. And I prefer to see it as a natural rebalancing act. It has nothing to do with vengeance. One of the things I love about knowing indigenous cultures is that they don't see themselves as superior to nature. And they don't rank anything in nature as being better or lower or higher on the evolutionary scale. You know, like we're the most intelligent ones kind of things. They don't do that. And so if you watch what happens, if a predator species eats up too much of its prey, of course, the more it eats of its prey, the more there will be of the predator because they'll be reproducing more, there'll be more of them. Okay, what happens? You're going to run out of rabbits if you're a wolf or whatever. And then what happens is that your species starts starving off, lowering its frequency or its population. So there's a natural rebalancing of population control that goes on in nature like that. And now the trouble with humans are destroying so many ecosystems that we're constantly upsetting the balance. And where do the monkeys go when you've destroyed their homeland? They come and jump on you and their viruses. Now you're not adapted to their viruses, so you end up getting sick. And we've seen that, that we can get these viruses from whether it's monkeys or bats or whatever. If we weren't destroying their ecosystems, if we were living in respectful harmony with these other creatures, we wouldn't be getting infected. We wouldn't be life-voked, for the guy said, the strongest survivors of our genocide. Yeah, no, that's exactly pertinent. To this movie I told you about, the movie we are making which shows the dependency and interaction of climate change and viruses like COVID. And it seems to me that climate change, at least you can see this happening daily in Africa, climate change affects the ability of human beings or animals to live in a certain place. And so they move, they have to move to survive. It's a survival thing. And when they move, maybe they carry some antigens with them or they become subject to the antigens. And presto, you have bats and all kinds of animals that carry something that is an antigen or people get into vulnerable situations. And so the evolution of the planet is causing the evolution of human health and viruses simply by requiring people to migrate to other environments. Have you thought about that? Yes, absolutely. I mean, we brought this climate change on through our own predations. We've loaded the atmosphere with too much greenhouse gas and all those things. So the way we've behaved so rapaciously, I mean, if you look at the effects of humanity on the climate and you just trace the population curve of humans along with, say, the curve of oil exploitation. And that's where all of these toxic food chemicals come out of the whole oil age, right? The pharmaceuticals come out of the oil age. Rockefellers a hundred years ago, you know, bribing and coercing all the medical schools across the U.S. to move to simply drug-based medicine because they were selling all these pharmaceuticals. And so they did away with, yeah, I lived in Washington, D.C., on Massachusetts Avenue for during the two Clinton inaugurations. And outside my building, four blocks from the White House, there was a beautiful statue, still is, I believe, of Hanuman, the founder of homeopathy in our nation's capital. And I'm saying, what is a homeopathy founder doing in Washington? So I did the homework. And I found out that the medical school used to teach homeopathy, along with osteopathy and other natural medicines and things like that. And then that got taken away. But the statue didn't get taken away. And I'm very happy that it's still there because you can point to that. The way we evolve ourselves is not natural. Anyway, if you look at all these exponential curves, the population of the world has more than tripled, almost quadrupled in my lifetime. And it took a long time to get to as many people as there were when I was born. And now suddenly we're leaping up. And that's why what we mean by the word unsustainability is very clearly shown by exponential curves. You cannot shoot sky high. You cannot continue this level. If this level of population growth happens, it's crazy. Well, of course we'll be died off because there won't be any room for food no matter what we do. So it's really what you're talking about is birth control because the planet cannot support 7 billion, 8 billion, 9 billion people. Something will go wrong. Something will collapse. Maybe that migrant phenomenon I talked about, or maybe other things. And with all respect to homeopathy, the fact is that modern technology is intended to keep as many people alive as we can keep to feed them, to give the medicines to survive, and so forth. And it wants to, and clearly the mission is to service them, to provide food and living conditions, and so forth. And to have as many as possible. And then you get into this really strange debate in this country about birth control. People don't want birth control. Catholic Church doesn't want birth control. And so you have the population grows and grows and grows into a planet which cannot support it. So if you're talking about making a sustainable planet, you really have to have the old, and this is a discussion that was had in my childhood, in the 50s and the 60s, you really have to have global birth control. However you do that, you cannot let people, you should not encourage them to have a lot of kids. And you should certainly discourage them from having a lot of kids. And so forth. And we're not doing that at all. And the population is therefore growing into a planet that can't support them. Is that where you are? Well, we've known for a long time that the best birth control there is is education for girls. And it's been proven over and over that in those populations in Africa, wherever it has been tried, that every year of education for a girl is usually one baby less. So if you give her 12 years of education, she never does this baby. That's very good. Again, we don't want to hear about stuff like that. It violates our social norms, our ranking, our caste system, which is really, really coming to light now. And yes, it will be quite frankly, I've been tracking climate change for over half a century. And I see no way out of a desperate situation at this point. I, when teaching my MBA course at Shamanad, the last time I taught it, I had the students design a board game about sea level rise here in Honolulu. Because we know what one meter level rise will do. We know what a six level meter, six meter level will do. And you can find the maps online of the whole globe. You can home in on any part of it and raise it sea level to see exactly what's going to happen. This is going to happen for the simple reason that we have no way to stop it. We have set this thing in motion and we cannot stop it. And if we were getting real about it, we would focus all of our attention and energy right here in Hawaii on growing sustainable food, making ourselves free of imports if necessary. We know that there was as big a population on these islands when Captain Cook got here as there is today. And it was sustainable. It was feeding itself. Well, it was sustainable until the plague got here. Well, who brought the plague? Of course. If they hadn't let anybody come ashore, there would be millions of Native Hawaiians here today. Let me go to one thing. The point there just is that it is possible to make these islands self-sufficient in food. And I will not disagree. I believe that if we really attended to this, this is almost like a biblical test. It's a test of the species. We know intellectually that we can do better. We know intellectually that we can get away from the toxins, get away from the pathogens. We can have better immune systems. We can do better against climate change. But we don't seem to really do anything about it. I mean, we're talking here today, how much of this is going to be converted into action? Is the state legislature going to do something? Even at an immediate level, no, I don't think so. What about a long-term level? I doubt it. We go through different iterations of the same talk fest, but we never actually do it. And so what concerns me and what I want to ask you about is, where is this all going? I would agree with you that we really haven't done much about climate change, except exacerbated. We've done a lot to exacerbate it. But to ameliorate it, no. And even to defend against it when it strikes back, mother nature, striking back on us. And so it just gets worse and worse and worse. And as the population grows, that makes it worse too. So query, this is a hard one. This is the ghost of Christmas future. What is going to happen? What is going to happen assuming that this failure of response continues, which I believe it will? Not to you and me. Well, we won't be around, but give it a few generations off in the future. What is going to happen in the evolution of climate change and humanity? Well, I can't spill a single scenario out very clearly because we don't know, for example, we could have so bad methane leaks in the Arctic, in Siberia, where it's already bubbling up and stuff like that. And you have bigger and bigger methane holes, but they're in the oceans in the ice. That could snuff everybody. But let's say it isn't going to be that dramatic and let's focus just on the concept of the sea level rise. I can guarantee you that it will not rise a centimeter at a time, nice, slow, nice, slow linear curve, not even an exponential curve that's slow for another couple of centuries and then bumps us. It's going to happen a meter or two or five at a time, jumps, sudden jumps, big tsunami, and then when it goes away, it doesn't all go away. It leaves you with a meter higher sea level rise. Okay, what does that mean for us here? It means that our airport period and our peers could get wiped out overnight. In other words, we could have that big a climate emergency that we had a three meter sea level rise because a huge slide came off Greenland, which now has very little skirt ice holding up the ice that's on its rocks. And we know that the ice on its rocks is already lubricated by water that's gone down these big holes in the ice. It's all been monitored and shown. And so once that ice starts breaking up, it'll be like a domino thing. They'll come charging down. So sooner or later, we're going to have that kind of leap. Meanwhile, in the building right behind me, there's a building that's being built now. It's already more than twice as high as my building. And I watched it being built. I watched the foundation being laid. It took them over six months to tamp down the water table, which is less than the height of a man below the surface here in Ala Moana. That's on the King Street side of Capulani. Okay. This is the same situation as a lot of the Kakaako building as the Waikiki buildings. They all have their feet in the water. They all run sump pumps 24-7, right? This is not good because when that sea level comes up really hard, forget the pumps, the base, the whole foundations will be washing out. They are built on coral reef with landfill on top of it, right along this fragile coast. And when I called Washington, which has a department of fragile coastline, I said, I know that the new buildings being put up on our fragile coastland have some kind of a waiver that somehow they got ecological passage. But do you consider the number of buildings being built in small areas and what the combined weight of those buildings will do? It is not hard to calculate the weight of a new building, empty or occupied. It takes a little bit of math to do it, but we do it all by computer. She said, oh, man, I never heard of that. Yeah, it hasn't even crossed their minds. Do you think in terms of the individual? It goes for the proposition that we're doing too little too late, and this is going to catch. It is exceeding our ability, exceeding our action, and certain things are going to happen. I'll just list some of them. And it's not just sea level rise. It's this extreme weather. Fire, floods, drought, floods. I mean, it's biblical. And what are we doing about that? Well, not much, but these things taken either at Syriotum or in a parallel way, which it probably is going to be parallel, all happening at the same time, are going, first of all, they're going to change the place we live. We're going to have to move. We're going to have to migrate even here in this country. Our economy is going to be in the tank. We are not going to have the money to do the things we could do now, okay, because by the time we get to a point where we realize how serious this is, we won't have the money to deal with it. And finally, going back to the point of virus, if we all have to migrate and we all have to congest in a place that isn't built for us to put pressure on the environment, so to speak, we're going to wind up with new pathogens, new diseases that we can't handle. And our health system is a function of our economy. So we're not going to be able to handle it. And at the end of the day, and here's my point, and this is my last question to you, at the end of the day, you can't sustain 7 billion or 8 billion people in a world which is deteriorating, maybe not right away, but in 10 or 20 years or something, not too far off. You can't sustain them. So if you can't sustain them, what happens? They die. They die. The population of the world dies. And my question to you as an evolutionary biologist is, well, this is an awful way to frame it, but well, maybe that's the way Mother Nature tells us that we better be better. We better deal with sustainability because the price is that billions of people cannot exist. They'll have to go away. So it's Mother Nature controlling the population of the earth, isn't it? Well, again, I don't like that image of Mother Nature doing it when we're doing it to ourselves. I'm 100% of the responsibility on our human shoulders. And there are ways out of this. You're so right about the pathogens, because remember that even a little bit of sea level rise is going to, the first thing it will do is back up the sewage in these cities, right? We've seen sewage floating in our streets already a couple of years ago. We don't want to talk about it. I think it's happening in some neighborhoods right now. There are solutions, and we're not doing them. On the global horizon is a severe cutback of humanity. We'll be lucky if a couple billion of us survive this. Okay, I keep my optimism up by saying to everybody, you and your loved ones can be among those survivors if you get things right now. And my passion is for here in Hawaii, there is a very simple solution. Our state government could issue a local currency, call it alohas. Do it digitally. Really easy to do, right? Gee, doesn't take a lot of personnel. And give those alohas, pay those alohas to all the unemployed people here, all of the hotel workers who were making beds, to grow healthy organic food on government land. Dick, tell everybody you're going to be able to pay your state taxes in these alohas. That validates the currency. This is how other states got out of the 1929 depression. They issued scripts, local scripts. The alohas are no good offshore. So that means every aloha you earn here in Hawaii stays in Hawaii. So at circuit, you need less money if you circulate it faster. We now pay people in dollars and it goes right out through Costco, Walmart, and you know who. Right out of the state, right? All grains offshore. Say nothing about the hotels. Now then you dictate that food suppliers and landlords have to accept these alohas. And very quickly, you could boost the economy, not doing anything about the dollar. You're running in parallel with it. You can link the value to it if you want, but you're not interfering with the dollars at all. And this is completely legal way to operate. You know what I get out of this is something we all knew is that this is a big problem. And as in the biblical reference, we have to do it together. It's a test of our community. And Hawaii does have an advantage because we're remote from the mainland because we have perhaps greater control over these things or greater consciousness and environment. And it seems to me that we have a flying chance of doing this, but we have to act together. It's not enough that you feel this way or even that you govern your life this way might help you to a certain limited extent. But if you want the community, the society to survive and thrive, the society must act together. So far, we haven't done that. But I hope we do. And I think we should have further discussions of this, Elizabeth, to talk about exactly drilling down on how the legislature, how the governor could adopt initiatives that would make it possible here in Hawaii. We have to distinguish ourselves or the result will be terrible. Thank you very much, Elizabeth. I hope we can get together again soon. Do I get a last word? Of course you do. You have to close. It's your obligation to close. Okay. Well, I just want to point out that Dr. Tusi, you know Dr. Tusi, Papalii, Hawaii University of Hawaii professor and Samoan, while they're dear friends. He just wrote an in an email. He said some wonderful things about how the initial reaction of our society to any kind of a discomfort is a kind of shoot first, ask questions later approach. And that in, you know, I'm trying to get across that we have set ourselves up so arrogantly above nature, so we're superior to it, rather than having the humility to learn from it, understand how utterly dependent we are on our micro world. And so what he talks about is, is how Aloha is not about healing. I mean, it's not about curing a disease. It's about healing, healing the disease, the disease, rebalancing things. And we know what to do, as you pointed out. So really, Jay, why do we stay in prison when the door is so wide open? My favorite roomy line. Why do we stay in prison when the door is so wide open? We know what to do. Okay, Elizabeth, we're going to leave it there, but we'll circle back. We'll have a further discussion. I'll be asking you some hard practical questions at that time. Thank you so much. Harder? Harder, yeah. Even harder. Okay, I'm up for it. All right. Thank you, Elizabeth, that Taurus always enjoy our discussions. We'll do it again soon. Aloha.